The Evercool HPL-815 can be oriented in one of three ways, with Evercool reccommending not to mount the heatpipes in an “upward” direction (ie: towards the top of the case); folks using this cooler for installations where the motherboard is going to be placed horizontally, as in an HTPC, have no such limitations. The fins on the HPL-815 feel reasonably strong, and pushing against them does cause them to give slightly, but not as much as on some other heatsinks (such as the Transformer 3). At no point during the review were we concerned about damaging the fins.